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Diana’s Blog July 2017

We have come to a few notable mile markers on our trip thus far. We have completed our second year of boatschool and the required annual testing and have submitted the kids’ test scores to the school district all rule following and legal like. We have officially been gone for one year and we have traveled about 3,000 nautical miles exploring the west coast and Baja Mexico. We have learned a lot about Mexican culture, travel, and have grown as a family and as individuals.

The kids had their birthdays and we celebrated Jake with Sushi and the movie Cars 3 (in Spanish) in a luxury air conditioned theater with seat side waiters to bring us our snacks. Sarah chose a bar-b-que restaurant for burgers where they grill in the front end of an old chevy truck and had the most disgusting store bought beautiful but inedible chocolate cake. We saved the chocolate bars that surrounded the cake and fed the rest to the fish…(hope they liked it).

We are looking forward to boatschool in the fall when we will be continuing with our Mystery of History Volume III, Life of Fred Math, The Way Things Work Now for Science, translating Spanish Children’s books for Spanish language, and using the DK Book Help Your Kids with Language Arts with some continued work on mastering essay writing. The kids are reading a variety of books for their personal reading as well.

It is hard to believe that we have been gone for an entire year! We have had some grand adventures and certainly some trials but we have worked together to accomplish a lot of projects and repairs and we are feeling pretty good about the boat and all systems aboard. Darius has been able to relax a bit and focus more on wearing his socializing straw hat and his captain’s hat and less on wearing his engineer hat.

We have been working on wellness as a family and have seen some great changes come about due to a focus on eating a more plant based diet. We have shed some pounds and rid ourselves of some allergies and are just generally feeling better overall. We have struggled a bit to find healthy delicious vegetables and meat alternatives that would be so easily found in all of the grocery stores at home, but have decided that sticking to the basic veggies we can find and lots of rice and beans works well in this culture. We will head out in just a few minutes to gather a few groceries in a village that we just pulled into that has only a few small “tiendas” or corner stores. Wish us luck…

So, summer in Mexico is no joke… it is 94 degrees outside and 112 degrees in the boat at anchor. We bought an air conditioner that we can use in the middle of the day when we have the generator running but that costs a lot in fuel that is fairly expensive and sometimes hard to come by , logistically. We have been getting our exercise by walking for what we need from town and by swimming…lots and lots of swimming, and a bit of early morning of late at night dock or beach yoga.

We have had amazing interactions with many local Mexican people. Darius never fails to initiate conversations and we have been invited to share in some parties and family gatherings and have found awesome people sitting around campfires on the beach or at birthday parties or wherever we have involved ourselves in the Mexican culture. We were just saying to each other that everywhere we go the people are amazingly friendly and helpful and they go out of their way to show us their hospitality. We have truly found a beautiful culture of happy, loving, family oriented people.

It has been such a pleasure to explore Mexico for six months that we are crossing the border and re-entering the country to renew our visas for another six months. We are traveling as far north into the Sea of Cortez as possible and crossing the border by bus at Nogales and going to visit Jeremy and Anna and our baby Isabella in Tucson where they are relocating to. We are going to head slowly down the mainland coast of Mexico for the next six months and then on to Guatemala, Panama, and Costa Rica, and then we’ll decide on our next leg.

We have taken a bit of time to “discover new or hidden talents and interests amongst ourselves and have enjoyed seeing those play out and unfold for each of us. I have been able to lead us down a more healthy, nutritious, active path and am loving the time I have to spend on my family, Darius is loving the chances he gets to encounter others and share stories and love and encouragement with them and he is going to spend more time playing guitar and writing us some more original music. Sarah is exercising her creative mind in ways we can only begin to touch on from being a bank teller today with her homemade cardboard laptop computer and teller cage and debit cards to establishing the Fun Never Ends Summer Club that she franchised out to her sister, Allie who is to be hosting an equally amazing fun club in Olympia, sharing a fun filled daily schedule and routine.

Finally, Jake has joined a couple of minecraft factions and has been building all sorts of amazing spawners and machines and even has a store that is stocked with crafted items. So much fun and learning and personal growth we have to be thankful for.

We want to thank all of the Members of the HabiHoba Group on Facebook and say hello and we love you to all of our friends and family and know that we are thinking of all of you and we miss you but also to let you know that we feel truly blessed to be able to take this trip and experience the love , life, and adventures that God has waiting for us in this great creation as we share the good news along our way.